While on the internets today I found that Mr. Level-up himself, N'Gai Croal, had finally updated his blog and tackled an issue that has been setting the game blogs ablaze: (note: I refuse to use the word blogosphere it is the most idiotic sounding word ever created) the issue of Mirror's Edge and innovation versus execution in video games.

Personal tastes aside, we don't buy the
argument that the nature or the amount of innovation in a game should
exempt it from criticism in other areas that determine how a reviewer
or critic evaluates a game's quality. Portal was plenty innovative, and
it has a 90 Metacritic score. Ditto for LittleBigPlanet with its Metacritic rating of 95. For a game whose mechanics vary from the norm as much as does Mirror's Edge, its Metacritic rating of 79
strikes us as not only fair, but also a bit high (Nintendo's
at-least-as-original game Wii Music, by contrast, is languishing at a Metacritic score of 62), in a way that suggests that DICE's first-person parkour game benefited rather than lost points for its innovation. Allow us to elaborate.

I finished the game last night and since I got close to the end this past weekend I have been trying to figure out how I am going to score it. It is hard to dislike it because when the game does things right, it REALLY does them right, but the flaws cannot be ignored.

As someone who appreciates when a game designer does something different I want to laud this game as much as I can. On the other side of the coin, as a critic there is no way I can give Mirror's Edge a perfect score because it is far from perfect.

I'm glad that I found this post, it really helped me in my decision. Full review later this week.

The rest of N'Gai's post and something completely different after the break.

The Idea: Game reviewers and game players get so
hung up on minutiae-i.e. game controls and combat systems-that too
often, they miss what's important and innovative about games. This in
turn creates a culture where gamers are searching for aspects of a game
to dislike. Instead, what's needed are more critics and gamers who
champion particular developers and games.

When a title attempts to explore uncharted areas, it risks
stumbling into areas that have been neglected for a good
reason--because they don't work as well. But when we fault them for
trying, without recognizing that the game might have done a few new
things well, or when we treat creativity or an attempt at inventiveness
as a design flaw, we're sending the industry some problematic mixed
messages. We demand innovation and invention, and then we crucify any
attempts in that direction.
--Leigh Alexander, Sexy Videogameland

[I]n the case of games that are different in some way (like a
new IP, or a sequel from a new developer as in the case of "Silent
Hill: Homecoming"), a lot of videogame critics obsess about the small
stuff because they don't like the big picture....If we re-arranged our
priorities, I think we'd have more critics "championing" certain games
or developers. In the end, that's what I'm calling for and I think
that's what Leigh's implying. In the film world, there were critics who
championed the then-radical filmmakers of the '70s who transformed the
world of cinema. Wouldn't it be great if there were more videogame
critics who championed certain titles or artists, while acknowledging
their imperfections, the way Leigh does "Silent Hill: Homecoming" and
Hideo Kojima?
--Ben Fritz, The Cut Scene

[I]f it were a movie, Mirror's Edge would be critically lauded by the
specialist film press--it would be considered a forward-thinking
masterpiece. Sure, it's dangerous to compare two such different media,
but there are key similarities--one is the way in which critics should
be able to deconstruct the experience on offer and draw from it
undeniable values that outweigh concerns about basic construction. For
example, no-one complains that, say, Pan's Labyrinth or Eraser Head
lack the formal, easily recognisable narrative structure of a
conventional movie. Their aspirations exempt them from that
requirement. So should we really be marking Mirror's Edge down for
control issues--a game that aspires to re-interpret the very interface
between player, screen and character? Yes, I know, it's a clumsy
comparison, but the underlying point is--should reviewers just accept
that sometimes incredibly new experiences will lack some of the formal
substance we expect from traditional games? That's what innovation is,
it's leaping out into the unknown.

The Reaction: Personal tastes aside, we don't buy the
argument that the nature or the amount of innovation in a game should
exempt it from criticism in other areas that determine how a reviewer
or critic evaluates a game's quality. Portal was plenty innovative, and
it has a 90 Metacritic score. Ditto for LittleBigPlanet with its Metacritic rating of 95. For a game whose mechanics vary from the norm as much as does Mirror's Edge, its Metacritic rating of 79
strikes us as not only fair, but also a bit high (Nintendo's
at-least-as-original game Wii Music, by contrast, is languishing at a Metacritic score of 62), in a way that suggests that DICE's first-person parkour game benefited rather than lost points for its innovation. Allow us to elaborate.

From
where we sit, the core mechanics of Mirror's Edge--the locomotion, or
movement, of the main character--are exceedingly well implemented. The same is true for the twinning of the player and the camera. The shooting mechanics,
however, are shockingly mediocre for a studio whose history and
expertise lie in first-person shooters. As for the hand-to-hand combat,
it's certainly well-animated and pleasing to the eye. Yet it's also
both perfunctory and unforgiving, which means that it's somewhat
satisfying when you get it right and thoroughly irritating when you get
it wrong.

Stuart and Alexander would have us believe that the
fault lies with reviewers and gamers who have disparaged any of the
game's mechanics--movement, shooting or hand-to-hand combat--while
being insufficiently laudatory of the breathtaking way Mirror's Edge
simulates the experience of le parkour. They're wrong and, if we can
turn back a phrase from Fritz, they're wrong in a way that misses the
big picture. Because while the locomotion in Mirror's Edge is
praiseworthy and innovative, the game it's wrapped it not only fails to
amplify and focus said innovation, the game by and large works against
it.

What do we mean by this? Mirror's Edge, far more so than
traditional platformers, is at its most exhilarating whenever you
achieve an unbroken chain of continuous motion. But because it uses a
first-person camera, it drastically reduces your situational awareness
as compared to a third-person camera system. That fact, combined with
the need to create varied, challenging gameplay scenarios, results in a
good deal of trial-and-error--which is precisely the opposite of Mirror's Edge
at its most exciting. Why? Because it breaks the flow and grinds
the action to a halt.

Imagine if after crashing in a Burnout
Paradise race, the developers started you over at a standstill rather
than already in motion, and you'll have a sense of how dissatisfying
failure feels in Mirror's Edge. Stuart, for his part, says that there's
just a "smattering of trial-and-error moments," which we'll graciously
chalk up to the superiority of his gaming skills over our own. Still,
the effect of this marrying classic try, die and retry failure states to
a trickier-than-usual platformer is to create an experience that
continuously alternates between elation and frustration, which steadily
erodes the sensation that DICE comes so tantalizingly close to imparting.

This
is why the most satisfying portion by far of Mirror's Edge is the Time
Trials. In this mode, you not only expect trial-and-error, you embrace
it, because you're trying to improve your time. And by taking
manageable portions of each level and isolating them to serve as Time
Trials, you get to know each mini-level well enough that you can
successfully maintain the unbroken chain of continuous motion that is
the best thing about Mirror's Edge. Even within an individual run,
there's still exploration, but it's highly focused on looking for an
aspect of the environment that you hadn't seen previously, an alternate
route that you'd missed, all in hopes of reducing the time that it
takes to get from beginning to end. Forget Madden NFL or NBA 2K: this
is the first game that we genuinely makes us feel like an athlete when
we play it. That's when it's firing on all cylinders, however, and more
often than it should, the Mirror's Edge story mode you feels like
you're shooting blanks.

A number of reviewers have likened
Mirror's Edge to Portal. It's an apt comparison: both are
first-person games that radically innovate on how players can traverse
from Point A to Point B; both games contain movement, platforming,
exploration and combat challenges. Yet the differences between the two are ultimately more
instructive than their similarities. Portal, at its core, is about
solving environmental puzzles in order to get somewhere. Mirror's Edge, by contrast,
is about solving environmental puzzles at top speed in order to get
somewhere as quickly as possible. (Yes, there are a number of
momentum-based obstacles in Portal, but the game is nowhere nearly as
dependent on continuous movement for its pleasures as is Mirror's
Edge.) The paradox is that while most story-based games rely on forward
progression (shuttling you from new environment to new environment)
Mirror's Edge is at its most alive in its circular progression (when
you replay an environment that you're already familiar with), something
which, on your first playthrough, only happens after you fail. That's
not an easy tension to resolve, and it hasn't been resolved.

The tragedy
here is that in the development time allotted, neither DICE nor its
masters at Electronic Arts HQ were able to do what Valve did a year
ago: figure out how to take the essence of Mirror's Edge and turn it
into a game that could be sold for $60. Sure, Valve placed Portal in
the tender, nurturing embrace of Half-Life Episode 2: The Orange Box, but it also
married the innovative portal gun gameplay mechanics to a narrative
structure, enemy placement and level designs that connected its 19
discrete puzzle sequences in a way that felt the whole felt greater
than the sum of its parts. Mirror's Edge does not, and that's what is being
reflected in its reviews. As Penny Arcade's Tycho put it,
"The main problem is that I love what they've done with the art and
with the style of play, but when they start hounding me with these
snipers and S.W.A.T. motherf---ers it quickly becomes a game I don't
want. I guess the idea is to make it more exciting, but I was already
having fun."

This is, of course, merely one blog's opinion. But
we opine in order to point out that while our fellow critics Alexander,
Fritz and Stuart are undoubtedly well-intentioned, we'd prefer that
they simply make the case for the aspects of various titles they find worthy
rather than attempt to police the discourse surrounding said games.
Criticism isn't crucifixion. Championing is great--it's one of this
generation's must-try titles; we urge anyone reading this to at least
try the demo; and we suggest that EA at some point decouple the Time
Trial demo from the exclusivity arrangements with various
retailers--but praising the praiseworthy aspects and criticizing the
failed ones is better. And Mirror's Edge isn't a masterpiece--it's
laudable but profoundly flawed--nor would its equivalent be widely
considered so in any other medium. Because for the discerning critic,
regardless of the medium being critiqued, both execution and innovation
matter. The fact that Mirror's Edge, by our lights, excels at
innovation but falls short on execution does not and should
not render it immune from the criticism it's received.

One more
point. In response the IGN UK review of Mirror's Edge which states "The
ideas are there for a very cool experience, and I truly hope that a
sequel is spawned, but this first attempt falls just a bit short," the
Guardian's Stuart replies:

The 'better sequel' mentality is damaging both to the games
industry and to the quality of games journalism. It is a deferral of
critical responsibility, a patronising pat on the head for the
developer who dared to dream and fell short in some mythically vital
way. I don't want to be frustrated by dodgy controls either, but then
I'm willing to blunder through if I'm going to get an experience I
never had before. I felt the same about Killer 7 and Shenmue and the
mobile game, Nom - flawed every one of them, but I don't begrudge the
creators a single second of the time I spent toiling with imperfections.

Similarly, in a Sexy Videogameland post that went live after the one we cited above, Alexander writes:

[A] main reason that this *** obsession on hardcore
mechanical issues bothers me is also that it illustrates the massive
divide between "us" -- the sort of folk that play a lot of games,
immerse ourselves in the culture around games, and read blogs like Sexy
Videogameland -- and your average consumer, who when playing Mirror's
Edge would probably be unlikely to notice the same things you do, and
who may actually (gasp) be more interested in something different than
something perfect. The IGN review of Mirror's Edge, for example, would
not only be impenetrable to the average gamer, but it would also not
necessarily predict his or her experience.

While taking issue
with Stuart's claim that Mirror's Edge is a masterpiece, Variety's
Fritz, in a post that went live as we were penning this screed, goes
even further in lambasting the IGN reviewer for even bringing up the
prospect that a sequel could solve what ails Mirror's Edge. He states:

What I think we both dislike is the cowardly critic, the one
who focuses on the details and refuses to engage with the big picture
ideas of the game....On the one hand, it's kind of a dismal acceptance
of reality--we all know there probably will be a sequel and EA/Dice
probably will address specific issues. But that's hardly the most
interesting thing about "Mirror's Edge," love it or hate it. This game
made some very high level choices and those are what reviewers should
be engaging.

First, Fritz's complaint doesn't quite square with the review, which
tackles a big picture idea when the reviewer states that there's a
conflict between the openness of the player's abilities and the
sectioned off nature of the world. (You can read the review for
yourself here.) Second, we hate to drag out our old chestnut of a quote,
but we'll do it yet again nonetheless: We see games with our hands. In
other words, not only do mechanics matter (why else would there be a
minor civil war between those who think the floaty physics-based
platforming in LittleBigPlanet is A-OK and those who believe that it
renders the game unplayable?) but mechanics are also improvable, both
between franchises (the cover system innovated in Kill.Switch but
significantly improved in Gears of War) and within the same series (the
cover system as built for the original Gears of War and as subsequently
enhanced for Gears of War 2). To pretend otherwise is to miss a
fundamental aspect of what games are and how sequels, downloadable
content and expansion packs can function in this medium. To let the
tastes of less knowledgeable gamers dictate the dialogue among those
who are more fluent in this burgeoning critical language is to neuter
the conversation. Let's avoid doing either.

The Verdict: Red light. Reviewers aren't perfect, but attempting to police the discourse by insisting on the primacy of innovation over execution is not the answer.